Google Fit – Google’s own health and fitness hub – is getting a handful of new features to make it a more useful app on both iOS and its home platform of Android.
The biggest change is the arrival of sleep tracking either via a compatible third-party app, or manually by adding them through the journal section.
From Google’s official screenshots (above), it doesn’t look as fully featured as automatic tracking from some of the popular wearable brands, merely showing the time you started sleeping and the time you woke up. Fitbit’s trackers with heart-rate monitors, for example, offer an analysis of sleep quality, guesstimating how much time you spend in light, deep and REM sleep based on movement and heart rate, and many others offer similar insights.
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Still, it’s a start and makes Google Fit a bit more useful overall, with the app now tracking sleep alongside heart-rate, weight and steps.
Like most popular apps, Google Fit is also getting its own dark mode theme. For those that don’t know, that means the colours shift to make it easier on the eyes for late-night browsing. In this case, the bright white background is shifting to a dark shade of grey while the blue Move Minute and green Heart Point rings get muted, too.
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Finally, a feature that’s familiar for Android users is coming to iOS: route mapping. Grant the app permission in Apple Health and route data from your Apple Watch, connected app or Wear OS device will plot a handy map of where you’ve run alongside your stats summary.
Google says these features are all rolling out over the next week, and notes that the iOS version – with dark mode and route mapping – are already live in the latest app update. Sleep tracking will follow on both apps soon.
Do you use Google Fit? Are these features a game changer? Let us know what you think on Twitter: @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
